richieb's Journal: HOPE 5 - Day 2 and Day 3

Saturday I had breakfast with Paul B. Then went to see the following talks:

• Building the Anti-Big Brother - a talk on making "transparent databases". Some cool ideas for uses of one-way functions.
• Propaganda in Art and Media - a panel discussions - some interesting comments from the audience.
• Keynote by Steve Wozniak. Wonderful, and inspiring talk. Makes you proud to be an engineer.

On final day Sunday we went to see these talks:

• Tactical Media and the New Paranoia - a panel by several art/tech groups applying technology in strange ways. For example, a remotely conrolled robot to do graffitti.
• Retrocomputing - another panel on the joys of 6502 machine code and Basic. Woz was on this one.
• Keynote by Jello Biafra - an amazing political rant agains the Iraq war, corporatization of the media and tons of other stuff.
• Social Engineering - panel and some demos of social engineering. Panelist included Kevin Mitnick and Emanuel Goldstein.

I took a lot of notes and some pictures on the last day. I'm planning to write a longer summary of all this to post here.

All in all an amazing weekend.